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What we aren't talking about when we talk about #beenrapedneverreported

It's a powerful hashtag that sparked a global discussion but much of the coverage leaves one thing out: male victims of sexual assault

An important discussion about sexual assault began on Twitter, but has the subsequent discourse left men out, to everyone's detriment?Photo: Bethany Clarke/Getty Images

Ashley Csanady

Published: November 6, 2014 - 3:35 PM

Updated: November 6, 2014 - 4:03 PM

In the wake of the Jian Ghomeshi allegations, two Canadian journalists sparked a global conversation about sexual assault on Twitter, but one already-marginalized group is being left out of the discourse.

Headline after headline says we’re finally having the conversation that so many female victims need.

But what about male victims of sexual assault? A few have chimed in on Twitter, but their voices aren’t as widely retweeted, repeated or parsed by traditional media. (Props to the Huffington Post, which devoted its homepage to the hashtag, for including men off the bat.)

One man who weighed in has become a public advocate for victims of childhood sexual abuse, and while he wanted to ensure male victims were included, he also didn’t want to draw attention away from the necessary debate about violence against women in our society.

“I feel so hesitant to add my voice to it because I see this as being a potential tipping point in Canada for women to start coming forward and saying ‘Hey, enough! This happened to me.’ I’m really cognizant that any male input in that might sabotage that; so I’m of two minds as to whether or not I should even be chiming in,” Jean-Paul Bédard.But he also wanted to share his experience in solidarity with all victims, and also to help address the specific stigmas that male victims face.

As both a survivor of sexual assault as a child and rape at the age of 12, he blogs about the issue and has started a campaign through his website MenUp.ca. He even ran the Boston Marathon — twice in a row! — this year to raise funds and awareness.

“Of all the male victims of other men, there’s this added dimension of sexual identity that comes into play,” Bédard said in an interview. “I think (the number of male survivors) need to be talked about more often.”

“There’s enough stigma that I think we could maybe approach it just from that stigma, pain and healing approach rather than this gender approach that really hasn’t worked,” he said, adding that women do need to feel safe discussing sexual assault, especially around men because they are the majority of perpetrators of such violence against both genders.

About one in three Canadian women will experience some form of sexual violence before the age of 18, research suggests; for boys, it’s about one in six, and some estimates go as high as one in five.

“Most research suggests that 10 to 20 per cent of all males will experience some form of sexual abuse or sexual assault at some point in their lives,” according to a post titled, “Guys are sexually assaulted too” on the Association of Alberta Sexual Assault Services.

“The majority of survivors are women, but what we need to be focusing on in terms of male survivors is letting men know that this can happen to them in the first place,” Joe McGuire, a sexual assault educator with Calgary Communities Against Sexual Abuse, said in an interview.

Male victims face the same stigmas as female victims, but they also encounter very different societal expectations.

There are many myths about male victims of sexual assault — from the fact that an erection does not equal consent to the sexual identity questions that arise from male-on-male sexual violence to the stigma of men reporting female-on-male rape. Just think of all the movies and TV shows that employ the trope of female-on-male sexual violence as funny. Imagine if some of those iconic scenes depicted men doing that to women.

“There are different barriers for men (reporting sexual assault), they’re not more serious or less serious,” said McGuire, adding that could be that they don’t consider what happened to be assault or they worry they’ll be seen as less of a man for coming forward because it’s a women’s problem.

There’s a societal narrative that men and teen boys are rampant, always-on sexual creatures. McGuire said media coverage of adult female teachers sexually assaulting teenage students is often referred to as a relationship but it’s actually “textbook child sexual abuse… but the media seems to again that idea that men having sex is so innate that we think oh it can’t be that bad because he’s a guy.”

“I think pop culture and especially movies contribute to that stereotype and that myth in a really big way,” McGuire said. “The root cause of a lot of this assault in based in harmful traditional notions of masculinity.”

Tackling some of those toxic societal tropes could reduce all forms of sexual violence against all genders, so no one feels the need, decades hence, to say they’ve #beenrapedneverreported.